The Crisis

It was a quiet night in all precincts. Patrolman Francis De Feis shot at a fur thief in front of Brooklyn's Paramount, accidentally killed an elderly woman waiting for a trolley (and the United Nations never stirred). Longshoreman Willie May was ambushed and shot dead through the window of the men's room in the Four Leaf saloon on Henry Street (and the Moscow press did not even toss an adjective). Three liquor stores were held up, involving a total theft of $713 and one gold watch (the U.S. State Department did not so much as lift an eyebrow). Mrs. Mary Gordon, returning home from the movies, stabbed her husband with a bolo knife (and East and West still held their uneasy peace).

But when two swarthy thugs held up the New Yorker Delicatessen Store (one in a chain of 67) on 58th Street, in the genteel shadow of Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, it was the hand of history itself which struck among the liverwursts.

What Others See. In best holdup style, Clerk Joseph Braunspiegel had just been ordered to the small toilet in the rear of the store, when two unsuspecting customers walked in. They were A. D. Voina, Ukrainian delegate to the United Nations, and Gregory Stadnik, a minor delegation adviser. The thugs promptly backed them up against a shelf full of Ritz crackers, Sun Crown prunes and Bernice Fruit Mix. One of the thugs fired the shot that was heard around the world; it caught Stadnik in the thigh bone.

Nobody was quite sure what had provoked the shot, but the New York Times solemnly reported that the two Ukrainians were "large enough to be mistaken for detectives"; that, of course, explained it. Other aspects of the shooting might seem perfectly natural to New Yorkers, but inexplicable to Europeans, who can never quite abandon their ingrained belief that the U.S. scene consists largely of Indian massacres and gang battles. Could the law-respecting British, for instance, understand why two women customers who had seen the shooting failed to come forward until the police laboriously sought them out?

The Russian press exploded with charges that the shooting was obviously political, because the bandits failed to take money from either the cash register or the Ukrainians. Lev I. Medved, a physician who heads the Ukraine's delegation to ECOSOC, said that Stadnik had been shot by a dum-dum bullet (contrary to The Hague Convention governing civilized warfare), sputtered: "Thousands of people in the U.S. are not shot every day. This is an exception." Stadnik complained he had fought through World War II without a scratch--only to be struck down in a supposedly friendly land.

Sneered the Soviet news agency, Tass: "[New York papers] seek to present the attack as usual for the New York way of life. However . . . the attempt was of a political character. . . ." Snarled Ukrainian Chief Delegate Dmitri Manuilsky: "Political banditry. . . . If the authorities cannot protect us, either it will be necessary to have our own agents . . . or maybe to pay income tax to somebody like Al Capone for protection. . . ." In a bristly letter to Secretary of State Byrnes, Manuilsky charged a "premeditated attempt" on the two men's lives.

As such statements boosted the incident toward Sarajevo-like proportions, Clerk Braunspiegel, wild-haired and sad-eyed, a staunch middle-of-the-roader, sought to ease the tension. Mused he: "We should give in a little, Russia should give in a little . . . I don't know."

Narrow Escape. Meanwhile, New York's police blotter showed that the world had barely missed an intensification of the crisis. On the night before the fateful holdup, one Joseph J. Hall set out on a nefarious enterprise with one Ronald E. Fisher. But when Hall realized that Fisher was trying to make him rob a church, he got religion and called the police: "We broke into a church, but I'm not going through with it." The house of God on East Fourth Street, thus providentially spared, was the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America.

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